An envelope drops through my letter-box and I start a blog. I haven’t blogged for a while. I’m in political hibernation. I’m depressed by politics. I’m particularly depressed by the general election pantomime. So I haven’t blogged.

In this morning’s envelope is the election edition of the Unite union’s magazine Unite Works. On the first page the union’s General Secretary, Len McCluskey, tells me “Seize this day. Vote Labour”. Then the rest of the magazine tells me about Labour’s election promises, including quotes by the Labour leader Ed Miliband.

One of them is about “fair wages” and, in part, the legal minimum wage. The national minimum wage is currently £6.50 an hour and Ed’s promise is to “raise the minimum wage to £8 an hour before 2020”. (I immediately wonder why we should have to wait up to 5 years, but anyway …)

Neither of these could be described as a living wage. And that brings me to the second Miliband promise. He will, he says, “encourage more employers to pay the Living Wage”. (I immediately wonder why he says “encourage”, not “oblige” or “compel” or “force”.)

Anyway, note the capital letters. The Living Wage is not to be confused with a real living wage. With capital letters it is the wage set by the Living Wage Foundation (LWF), and employers need to pay that wage if their aim is to get on LWF’s list of nice employers. It is, of course, a voluntary scheme. The LWF’s rate at the moment is £7.85 an hour. Once again, lots of people on hourly rates don’t work anything like a full week or even a full day. Even if they did, this is not a living wage.

The calculations to establish the level of the Living Wage are made by the Centre for Research in Social Policy (CRSP), funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Decisions are made on “how much income households need to afford an acceptable standard of living” – that is, on a calculation of the so-called Minimum Income Standard for the United Kingdom. These decisions, says LWF, “are made by groups comprising members of the public”. Unfortunately, I have not managed to identify who these “members of the public” are. It must be a secret. It is certainly not clear whether they include people who are on the minimum wage – people, that is, who know from experience what is “acceptable” and what is not.

Anyway, if we take the current national minimum wage, the current Living Wage and Labour’s proposed national minimum wage (if we’re lucky, some time in the next 5 years) – none of them amounts in fact to a real living wage.

No change, then.

Now for another promise: Ed also claims: “We will ban exploitative zero hours contracts to ensure workers who work regular hours get a regular contract.”

Note, this is not a promise to abolish zero-hours contracts, just the “exploitative” ones (I immediately wonder how anything called a “zero-hours contract” could be described as “non-exploitative”). Anyway, what this seems to mean is that if you’re on one of these contracts and you work regular hours you will get what he calls “a regular contract”.

With considerable sleight of hand, Unite approves of this: “Labour will ban zero-hour contracts – so if you work regular hours you will get a regular contract.” But if I’m not getting “regular hours”, but instead wait for the phone call each morning to tell me whether to come in for work or not I presumably stay with my zero-hours contract. I don’t call that a ban. And how many people on such contracts get to work regular hours? The joy of zero-hours contracts for bosses is that they don’t have to give regular hours.

In his editorial, Len McCluskey wants us to believe that a Labour government would “attack the evil of zero hours, hire and fire working”, i.e. that zero hours contracts will disappear under Labour.

But Labour’s promise is a tricky bit of wordsmithery that we’d better not fall for, eh Len. It will only be bad for our health. It will only make a bunch of disenchanted voters more bad-tempered than we are already when what we took for a promise disappears into thin air.

And how to vote? I don’t know. That’s why I’m going back to hibernation.